Sometimes I come here not knowing exactly what I want to say. I sit down at the keyboard with a feeling and start to type. Today I’m thinking a lot about acceptance.
It’s an idea I came to later in life, via a twelve-step program that suggested it might help me feel less angry, resentful, hurt, frustrated, etc. I discovered that it works pretty well, but that it’s also elusive. You can tell yourself to accept something, say your human frailty for example, but it can be hard to will that acceptance into being. It’s much easier to accept something ephemeral, like getting cut off in traffic, than it is to accept the home truths of the aging process.
Let me start again.
Even within my own skin, I have very little control over the goings on. My lower back hurts. My right calf has a thin rope of soreness running through it. That ankle can’t bear weighted flexion without producing a hot pain. My left Achilles is perennially in some state of tendinosis. My right shoulder has not been entirely right since I broke my collarbone three years ago. It makes a gravelly grinding sound when I rotate that joint in the morning, ostensibly to loosen it up, but mostly to marvel at how loud it is. My prostate is enlarged (benignly according to my PSA tests), and my frame of mind is erratic, despite 5mg of antidepressant taken daily to ward off my darkest thoughts.
People propose solutions.
I’ve been told my hips are maybe too tight, that I ought to walk around barefoot more, that I should lift heavier weights, that daily yoga would be a good idea, that I should eat seeds or cut out sugar, that animal flow is the thing, that supplements are good/useless, that inflammation, generally, is the culprit. And I am forever tinkering, stretching, working out, trying new things to try to get my body together. I’ve seen doctors who shrug or send me to PT. I’ve done the PT. I’ve rested.
No one is in control of this thing. Not me certainly, and I live inside it.
Our bikes are like this too. We get them tuned and lubed. We stay on top of things (<wink>I know we don’t), and yet they oxidize relentlessly in all of their metal parts. This is happening microscopically, even if you aren’t seeing it. Carbon fiber hatches invisible cracks from the voids in its layup. The body of your bike is limited by tensile strengths and the long-period predations of multi-directional force.
Look, I’m sorry. This has all grown a bit fraught. It’s a lot to take in, and if you’ve been carefully avoiding this information, I can’t blame you, and I do apologize sincerely for being the bearer of these regrettable truths.
If you read the title and started making a list in your head of things you can’t control, it was probably a long one before you got to this paragraph. Either that, or you entertain a certain number of possibly useful delusions, like that good results always follow good actions, or that a reasonable diet and exercise will keep you healthy. I’m not trying to scare you. You should do good things. You should eat right and ride your bike. Most of the time, those things will produce desirable outcomes. They won’t hurt you, unless they do.
Listen, there is plenty outside of our control that is literally outside of our own bodies and minds. The way other people ride. The small sharp things that flatten tires. The mechanical vagaries of parts we didn’t design or manufacture. But most days, in fact on more and more of them as I get older, the call is coming from inside the house. How do I accept the entropy that’s literally tearing me apart with some measure of grace while simultaneously pouring my energy into putting myself back together?
It’s absurd.
This is another idea I took time to understand. When you’re young you’re busy trying to make sense of everything. How does it all work? Later you learn that sometimes it doesn’t, that causes often don’t have the effects you expect. Fortunately, absurdity and humor are closely related, and this, I think, is where I can begin to push back against the soul-level disappointment of slowly falling apart.
I have been high on a hillside, up where it’s steep, with a few too many miles already in my legs, sweat salting my temples, long past the point of digging into my reserves to keep going, and then suddenly burst out in laughter. To be fair, I’ve cried too.
Day to day, it can be hard to find acceptance, but wittingly or not, you go out looking for it. Maybe it’s high on that hillside. Maybe it’s laying in the dirt after a crash. I had a good chuckle while still laying on the ground, with my collarbone just snapped, looking up at the trees, thinking “I hadn’t noticed what a nice day it is today.” I can’t always think myself out of trouble.
Accept. It’s a verb. Just like ‘ride.’ And there is so, so much we can’t control.
As my friend’s father said, when she was feeling particularly bent out of shape: “Cheer up, honey, it only gets worse.”
This reminds me of (a) why I have had Jane Kenyon’s poem “Having it Out with Melancholy” on my office door for the last 10 years; and (b) why I own 5 copies of Robert Burton’s 400-year-old, 1500-page masterpiece, “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” with its absurdly overeducated gallows humor.
Thanks for a beautiful meditation on fragility and impermanence.
This resonates strongly for me. I’ve been trying to figure out why, but don’t know how to express it. Thank you for writing.